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## Searching the Database
Carlina’s search of the NCMEC website was not a single dramatic moment. It was something she had been doing periodically for years — checking the database of missing children, scanning photographs of infants and children who had vanished across the country, wondering if any of them might be her.
She had searched Connecticut cases. She had searched the surrounding region. She looked at baby photographs and tried to see something that matched what she knew about herself.
The critical search happened late in 2010. By then, Carlina was living in Atlanta. She widened her geographic search to New York. And among the records she found was the entry for Carlina Renae White — an infant girl who had disappeared from a Harlem hospital in August 1987, at nineteen days old.
Sources that reported on the identification cite a birthmark on the baby’s arm as one of the matching details — a mark that Carlina had on her own arm, visible in the original infant photograph on the NCMEC listing. Some sources, including the All That’s Interesting account and the Marie Claire retrospective, also note that the age-progression photo on the listing resembled Carlina and her daughter. The NCMEC age-progression photographs are generated from the missing child’s infant photographs and from biological family reference photos; the fact that the image might resemble both Carlina and her daughter is consistent with how those images are constructed, though it adds a degree of interpretive uncertainty that Carlina herself would have been aware of.